1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present disclosure are directed to data center network design and management.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Data centers (DCs) are a critical piece of today's networked applications in both private and public sectors. The key factors that have driven this trend are economies of scale, reduced management costs, better utilization of hardware via statistical multiplexing, and the ability to elastically scale applications in response to changing workload patterns. A robust datacenter network fabric is fundamental to the success of DCs and to ensure that the network does not become a bottleneck for high-performance applications. In this context, DC network design should satisfy several goals: high performance, such as high throughput and low latency; low equipment and management cost; robustness to dynamic traffic patterns; incremental expandability to add new servers or racks; and other practical concerns such as cabling complexity, and power and cooling costs.
Current DC network architectures do not provide a satisfactory solution, with respect to the above requirements. In particular, traditional static (wired) networks are either (1) overprovisioned to account for worst-case traffic patterns, e.g., fat-trees or Clos networks, and thus incur high cost, or (2) oversubscribed, e.g., simple trees or leaf-spine architectures, which incur low cost but offer poor performance due to congested links. One way to realize a flexible network is to use a “patchpanel” between racks. However, this is infeasible on several fronts: (1) it requires very high fanout and backplane capacity, potentially nullifying the cost benefits, (2) the cabling complexity would be high, and (3) it introduces a single-point of failure. Recent studies have tried to overcome the above limitations by augmenting a static (wired) “core” with some flexible links, such as RF-wireless or optical links. These augmented architecture show promise, but offer only incremental improvement in performance. Specifically, RF-wireless based augmented solutions also offer only limited performance improvement, due to inherent interference and range constraints of RF links. Interference could be eliminated by enabling laser-like directionality in RF links, but this would require antennas or antenna arrays that are a few meters wide. Fundamentally, the challenge here is due to the large wavelengths of RF for commonly used RF bands. In addition, regulations regarding RF bandwidth and transmit power limit achievable data rates. Optical solutions offer high-bandwidth links and low latency, but have limited scalability, limited flexibility, and have a single point of failure. Furthermore, all the above architectures incur high cabling cost and complexity.